Things to do with a proffesional NVidia Graphics card

[gordan]

Is there any performance/functionality gain to be had for OpenCL?

No.

Concise and to the point, thanks. This way I don't have to read that long thread just to find out there's no point in modding (for my use case).

Glad I could help.

[powerhouse]

To summarize, there are two applications where professional NV video cards would make a difference: number crunching and virtual GPU.
Both features are enabled in software - appropriate drivers in the first case and VIB package in the second (for VMware hypervisor).
Number crunching is a bit of a vague definition, it includes CAD/CAM as well as video manipulation/encoding, etc.
Essentially anything that can take advantage of NV architecture.

Here is one real-life scenario. Mainframe-at-home sort of thing...
You have one computer tucked into the closet. 1-2CPUs, 2-3 PCIe slots. Running ESXi with the latest Horizon View 5.2.
You should have no problems running 5 to 10 VMs on it. Everything else in the house is a thin client running one of the VMs of this box.
Your smartphone and tablet can be such thin client. Maybe Google TV and Raspberry PI. Just good networking (wired and Wi-Fi) required.

If you have two GTX690 (modded to GRID K2) in the box, you can have 4 people play games with the equivalent of a GTX 680 each. At least in theory...

Well, there is a 3rd application for a professional NV card: VGA passthrough under Xen or KVM. Nvidia seems to have disabled this feature in all but a few select Quadro and Grid cards.

VGA passthrough is used to run for example a Windows VM on a Linux/Xen machine with full graphics acceleration using a dedicated graphics card for the VM. This is great for Linux users who need to run Windows occasionally, for example to use commercial Windows applications (e.g. Photoshop) or games that aren't available on Linux, and don't run in Wine. Before VGA passthrough the only real option for Linux and Windows users was dual-boot.

[petreza]

The nVidia GRID cards do not have local video output but the "regular" cards modded into K2s do. If you are sharing a modified-to-K2 card between several VMs, what shows when you hook up a monitor to the outputs?

If you are using one ESXi server at home to virtualize, say, 4 desktops, wouldn't it be nice to have one video card with 4 display port outputs displaying one virtual machine per port. Then pass-thrugh a separate usb port to each VM and use display port based KVM-switch to switch between the VMs.